Did Barack Obama Save Ohio?

The way John Kasich sees it, he is fulfilling a grand design, a mission for which he was chosen by God, to save Ohio. “It’s like what what’s-his-name told the hobbit,” Ohio’s Republican governor told me as we flew on the plane that ferries him around the state. “What’s that guy’s name? Gandel? Gandorf?” A pair of young aides seated across from Kasich called out helpfully over the drone of the engine. “Gandalf,” Kasich repeated. “Do you remember what he told the hobbit?”

I didn’t.

“ ‘You’re a very fine fellow, mister hobbit,’ ” Kasich intoned, waving a finger at me. “ ‘But this is a wide world, and you don’t think all these things happen by accident.’ ” He paused to let this sink in. “And I don’t think it’s an accident that I got into this job.”

It was a Monday afternoon in July. Kasich had started out his day at a predominantly African-American church in Cleveland, where he signed a bill making it easier for ex-felons to get work. Next up was Maines Paper and Food Service, which had just signed a new contract to deliver the burgers and flatware and whatnot to Wendy’s. Maines had decided to expand its operation in Ohio, rather than in Maryland, after Kasich’s administration offered a package of tax incentives, and Kasich beamed as he shoveled ceremonial dirt for the new facility. As we left, the first wave of unemployed workers was already queuing in the 95-degree heat to fill out applications for 100 new jobs driving trucks or working in the warehouse.

On the half-hour flight back to Columbus, Kasich reeled off the string of numbers that he said validated his success. Since he took office a year and a half earlier, the state had added 94,000 new jobs, and its unemployment rate had fallen from 9 percent to 7.3. (The most recent data pushed the total number of new jobs to more than 122,000, with the unemployment rate holding at 7.2 percent — more than a full point below the national average.) From May to July, Ohio added more jobs than any state except California.

“The word is slowly and surely getting out that something is happening in Ohio that’s different,” Kasich told me. “How much it’s getting out there, I don’t know. But it’s definitely out there.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and channeled Roger Waters at the Wall. “Is there anybody out there?” the governor sang.

At that very moment, Barack Obama was on a stage in Cincinnati, in the first town-hall meeting of his campaign, trying to persuade the people of Hamilton County, a historically Republican county that voted for him last time around, that he was the one responsible for rescuing Ohio. He talked about the tax cuts — $3,600 per household, by the administration’s reckoning — that accrued to middle-class families as part of the 2009 Reinvestment and Recovery Act, the so-called stimulus package, and a 2011 reduction in the payroll tax. More important, given the fact that Ohio makes more cars and auto parts than any state outside of Michigan, Obama reminded the crowd of his tough decision to save and restructure General Motors and Chrysler.

“When the auto industry was on the brink of collapse, and Governor Romney said, ‘Let’s let Detroit go bankrupt,’ I said, ‘No, one out of eight jobs in Ohio depends on the auto industry,’ ” Obama told the cheering crowd at Cincinnati’s music hall. “ ‘A million jobs across the Midwest are at stake.’ ”

These competing theories of progress in Ohio, waged 250 miles apart at the same moment, illustrate what may be the most important and confounding dynamic in this election. While most of the debate nationally still revolves around why the economy remains so pathetic, there are several pivotal states — Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia — where things are slowly turning around. In these states, the real issue may not be who deserves blame for economic ruin but rather who deserves credit for a rebound, and what really causes jobs to come back after they’ve been lost. Republican governors are saying that unemployment rates have plummeted because of their pro-business policies. The president is saying that the hard decisions he made earlier in his term are finally starting to pay off. And then there’s Mitt Romney, a congenital optimist who finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to be a total downer, arguing that there really isn’t a recovery at all. “Trust Me: You’re Still Miserable”could be Romney’s bumper sticker in Ohio.

In the years between the abrupt slowdown of 2001 and the collapse of the financial markets in 2008, much of America, buoyed by housing prices, saw their fortunes rise. Ohioans were not among them. The nation’s third-largest manufacturing state, Ohio got crushed between late 2001 and the onset of the next recession in 2007. The national foreclosure rate shot up after 2007, but even then it never reached the steadily rising level of foreclosures in Ohio. By early 2009, when Obama took office, tens of thousands of jobs were disappearing in Ohio from one month to the next.

Kasich, you may recall, had been a young Republican to watch as a congressman in his 30s, the brash son of a mail carrier who later fell in with Newt Gingrich and became one of his party’s leading voices for fiscal austerity during the Clinton years. After a brief and calamitous presidential campaign, he left Congress in 2001, at age 48, and reinvented himself as a Fox News host (“From the Heartland With John Kasich”) and a banker for Lehman Brothers. When Kasich ran for governor in 2010, the Democratic incumbent, Ted Strickland, ran almost entirely on the premise that it was really Kasich, in his role as a Lehman banker, who had wrecked the market and thus indirectly decimated Ohio. It was a dubious premise in a nightmare year for Democrats, and Kasich eked out a win.

He came into office planning to arrest the state’s free fall by doing two things. First, he had to close a projected $8 billion hole in the budget left by dwindling tax returns and the loss of one-time federal aid, which he did by slashing aid to municipalities and by slowing the growth in Medicaid spending. Second, he intended to stop bleeding jobs, mainly by changing the way the state interacted with businesses looking to relocate or invest elsewhere.

Going back to his days in Congress, Kasich has always been deeply skeptical of anything undertaken by the public sector. It was this instinct that led him, during his first months in office, to embrace the Legislature’s plan to curb collective-bargaining rights for public employees — a proposition Ohio voters soundly rejected in a referendum, and which most likely explains Kasich’s dismal approval ratings during much of his first term. (“I don’t want to talk about it,” Kasich told me when I asked him about that particular debacle.) And he was acting on the same disdain for government programs when he zeroed in on the state’s economic-development department, which was the main agency charged with retaining and recruiting employers. “People for years didn’t know what they were doing,” he told me. “They couldn’t even answer the phone.” The agency, Kasich believed, couldn’t be fixed from the inside — you wouldn’t be able to pay the salaries needed to lure top talent, and you wouldn’t be able to fire all the bureaucrats who had internalized the public-sector culture of the place. So instead he came up with a novel way to effectively outsource the agency’s chief responsibilities.

Kasich created JobsOhio, a private entity whose president is Mark Kvamme, a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley. In order to finance this nonstate agency with state money, he came up with a scheme so creative and convoluted it would make the Medellín cartel envious. JobsOhio would issue bonds to raise $500 million, which it would then turn over to the state. In exchange, the state would lease JobsOhio the rights to all state-run liquor sales for the next 25 years. Using the booze money, and given the authority to recommend tax incentives and state loan guarantees for approval by the Legislature, Kvamme and his team would move quickly and nimbly to keep Ohio companies in the state and lure new ones. In most of these cases, the goal would be to make sure that the state’s investment is repaid within a year.

The funding scheme has been the subject of litigation from a crusading civic group, and so far, no bonds have been issued; JobsOhio is still operating on corporate seed money. But when you walk into its light-filled office suite in a tower across the street from the Statehouse, you feel the high-tech start-up vibe all around you: pale cork floors and glass-walled meeting rooms, ergonomic furniture arranged bullpen style, giant HD monitors displaying relevant facts about the state and each of its eight major urban areas. JobsOhio is maniacal about metrics. In the second quarter of 2012, its team claimed to have helped land 77 new projects and 15,904 new jobs.

If JobsOhio is the administration’s principal negotiator with the corporate world, then Kasich sees himself as its closer. All governors do some amount of business outreach, but Kasich seems to relish it more than any other part of the job; he has little passion for state agencies and legislators, but nothing animates him more than recounting his lobbying efforts with executives. He talks up his state with the same combination of exuberance and competitiveness that has always made him a hero to some and intensely irritating to others. “We have a lot of great cities,” he told me at one point. “I mean, if you think of Indiana, you’ve got Indianapolis, and then what?” He threw up his hands. “Terre Haute?”

One of the first things Kasich did in the days after his election was to drive the two and a half hours to the town of Brooklyn, just outside Cleveland, so he could implore executives from American Greetings not to move to Chicago. (With financial help from the state, the company is now building a new headquarters a few towns over.) He personally intervened with Bob Evans, an iconic Ohio restaurant and food company, to keep it from moving to Texas, and he helped persuade Abbott Laboratories, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to undertake a $270 million expansion near Dayton. “I was really stalking the C.E.O. there,” Kasich said.

You’d have to think that all of this is having some positive impact. It’s just hard to know how much. Kasich has been in office for only 19 months, which isn’t a lot of time to engineer an economic turnaround, and for all of that time JobsOhio has operated in a half-empty office suite waiting for the financing that will enable it to fully staff up. According to federal data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, Ohio, like other states, actually began adding jobs in the middle of 2010, when Strickland was still governor. In other words, the positive trend line has accelerated during Kasich’s time in office, but it definitely didn’t start there.

In the past year, Strickland has emerged as his successor’s most persistent public critic, probably in part because Kasich routinely trashes just about everything Strickland did as governor. “There is a glaring lack of transparency associated with JobsOhio,” Strickland told me when we met at his office near the Capitol. “Any time you have massive sums of money and a lack of transparency, you open yourself up to the potential for cronyism and corruption.” Companies like American Greetings and Bob Evans were making empty threats to leave the state, Strickland said, and Kasich’s deals with them amounted to “shakedowns” that benefited no one. He said he really doesn’t think Kasich has had anything to do with growth in Ohio.

“I don’t want to be ungracious to my successor,” Strickland told me at one point.

I said I doubted that was true.

“Yeah,” he said with a shrug, “I was being dishonest.”

Gracious or not, it seems fair to suggest that Kasich is like a guy furiously paddling a canoe downstream — no one can take issue with his effort, but it would be more impressive if the current weren’t already working in his favor. For one thing, Kasich has lucked into the sudden boom around shale oil in the eastern part of the state, where only in the last few years have energy companies figured out how to extract oil and natural gas buried more than 5,000 feet below the ground. The Appalachian region of Ohio, which just a decade ago seemed to have been left behind with the closing of coal mines and steel mills, may now be the modern era’s equivalent of Sutter’s Mill in 1850. Corporate speculators and their engineers are packing the once-deserted hotels; stories abound of energy executives walking up to the doors of unsuspecting farmers whose homes were thought to be valueless and offering them seven-figure sums for the leasing rights.

Then there’s the sudden national uptick in manufacturing, a sector that accounts for roughly 1 in 10 Ohio jobs — and, more specifically, the resurgence of the auto industry, whose supply chain reaches into 80 or so of the state’s 88 counties. In Lordstown, a factory that three years ago seemed on the brink of closure (along with most of the rest of General Motors) is now operating three shifts around the clock, churning out the Chevy Cruze. In Toledo, where Chrysler builds Jeep Wranglers and Libertys, a second shift with 1,100 new workers will come online next year. Honda, which makes the Accord in Marysville, just invested $98 million in its engine plant in Anna, in the central part of the state.

Photo

Gov. John Kasich at a Honda plant in Marysville, Ohio. Credit
Jason Fulford for The New York Times

When I suggested to Kasich, aboard his plane, that Obama’s auto bailout must have played some significant role in turning around Ohio even before he took office, he waved me away as if he’d heard it all before. “Oh, it’s a fine thing,” he said. “But you look at the numbers. I mean, it’s like 700 direct auto jobs. Give them the benefit of the doubt — throw in a couple thousand. But we’re almost at 100,000 new jobs. So I’m glad the auto jobs are here, but let’s not try to paint a scenario that’s not accurate.”

I mentioned the opinion I’d heard from one economic analyst that Ohio’s growth was probably overstated, simply because the state lost so many jobs over the past decade that it was bound to add them back faster than other states once the national economy stabilized.

“We’ve added 100,000 jobs,” he repeated. “I mean, who’s up that much? And they’re not the typical jobs, are they? If you ask these same astrologers — oh, I’m sorry, I mean economists — where they think Ohio’s job growth is, they would tell you auto. Because a bunch of you guys in the press have actually swallowed this Obama argument that, oh, it’s because of the bailout of the auto industry that things are coming back. It’s absurd.”

In fact, Ohio might look very different today had Obama not acted early in his presidency. During those first few months, as economists openly debated the prospects for a global depression, the American economy was contracting at an alarming rate of more than 6 percent, and the administration was watching some 600,000 jobs a month vanish. As global demand fell and employers flailed, the demand for public assistance, mostly in the form of unemployment insurance and Medicaid, soared. Municipalities, watching their tax revenue shrink, were looking at huge cutbacks in schools and essential services. The panoply of economic and social curses that can result from such a cycle — more foreclosures, more crime, more untreated illnesses — can send states and cities tumbling for decades. If you need proof, go visit Detroit.

Obama’s first remedy of choice, the stimulus package worth more than $800 billion, remains unpopular. This is partly because three years later, the stimulus doesn’t really seem to have stimulated much real growth. But it’s also because a lot of the short-term assistance that came to states during that time wasn’t really visible to the public; it was used to maintain existing commitments to social programs and capital projects, the kinds of things that would have been noticed only had they suddenly disappeared — which could well have happened without federal intervention. According to figures kept by the administration, Ohio received some $3.5 billion in additional Medicaid payments, and more than 860,000 residents received expanded unemployment benefits. In addition, Ohio claimed about $8.8 billion for other projects, including public school systems, roadwork and police departments. It stands to reason that Ohioans, who make up about 4 percent of the country, received about that proportion of nearly $540 billion in tax breaks and income subsidies. If the Recovery Act didn’t turn things around in Ohio, it surely kept things from getting markedly worse.

And then, just a few months after the stimulus package, came the structured bankruptcy of G.M. and Chrysler, financed with public dollars because no private investor wanted anything to do with it. How much impact the auto bailout really had in Ohio is a question, like so many political debates, of how you assemble the data. Kasich was citing authoritative numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when he initially told me that the state had added only 700 jobs related to auto manufacturing. In August, after the bureau issued its latest figures, the Kasich administration revised that tally downward, claiming that the state had actually lost 3,200 auto jobs since the governor took office. In other words, even while he was talking up his state’s economic momentum, Kasich was insisting that the auto sector there had actually lost ground — and thus the president’s bailout had nothing whatever to do with the good news in Ohio.

Kasich’s aides arrived at these numbers by adopting the most limited definition you can reasonably have of what constitutes an auto job, taking into account only two categories of employees: those who assemble cars and those who make auto parts. The White House and the Obama campaign, not surprisingly, prefer a somewhat more expansive definition — one that includes, for instance, jobs created in dealerships and auto-parts stores. By their count, the federal auto bailout can be directly linked to more than 17,000 new jobs in Ohio over the three-year span beginning in June 2009 — and that’s not counting the new hires who make some of the steel that ultimately goes into all of these cars.

We can’t know how many new jobs would never have existed if not for the auto bailout, but it’s beside the point. What’s more relevant, and all but impossible to calculate, is how many previously existing jobs would have disappeared in Ohio had at least two of the three major American automakers gone under. The Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, who undertook the first federal intervention in the industry back in 2008, estimated (probably conservatively) that a million American jobs would be vulnerable, most of them in the Midwest. Obama’s advisers during the auto crisis privately discussed the possibility of a “Lehman risk” if they stood by while the auto companies tanked — in other words, a sudden collapse of the automakers might cause a catastrophic failure of the entire industrial sector, just as the dissolution of Lehman Brothers sunk the financial markets.

Eric Burkland, the longtime head of the Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, explained to me the accepted wisdom that for every guy who works in an actual auto plant or makes an auto part, there are seven jobs in supporting industries, usually in proximity to the plant — paint suppliers and sandwich shops, robotic designers and engineers, accountants and lawyers. “I spent a lot of time with a lot of automakers back then, and it was scary as hell,” said Burkland, who, like most of his members, counts himself as a Republican. “We were looking at a calamity of unknown proportions.”

This should be a compelling story for the president to tell — how he came into office and stabilized Ohio communities on the brink, how he preserved what may have been tens of thousands of jobs tied to the auto industry. And yet his advisers seem flummoxed about how to tell it, as they have so often been when trying to advance their agenda over the past four years. Their assumption seems to be that defending government spending, and the stimulus package specifically, remains politically treacherous. Public skepticism about large-scale government spending has hardened, and Obama seems reluctant to delve back into the argument. And the economy’s progress is so tenuous that the president seems wary of boasting about whatever he’s done to improve it, for fear of seeming indifferent and out of touch. Rarely will any White House aide make the case for Obama’s handling of the economy, even off the record, without adding in a hundred qualifiers about how tough times still are and how much better they’d like to be doing.

It’s not hard to imagine Bill Clinton, faced with similar circumstances, creating the perfect, poll-tested metaphor and tirelessly selling it. But Obama’s campaign this time seems to be long on hope and short on audacity. After much indecision, White House aides informed me that neither Obama nor Vice President Joe Biden was willing to make the case about how their policies had helped Ohio. Nor does the president’s campaign have any leading politician in the state to do that for him.

Instead, the job fell to Timothy Geithner, the treasury secretary. Geithner is a numbers guy and a policy maker, rather than a politician, and when we met he seemed uncomfortable saying anything that might be construed as overtly political; although he had visited Ohio twice to promote the president’s policies, he made no mention of it. But a few minutes into our conversation, Geithner leapt from his leather armchair and sat next to me on the couch so he could show me a graph depicting unemployment trends over the past six years in the country and in three states, including Ohio. The graph showed that regardless of where they started, all the states effectively followed the same trajectory as the nation as a whole, which showed a sharp rise in unemployment followed by a steady and satisfying decline that began in 2010. Ohio didn’t look appreciatively different from the others.

Was he suggesting, I asked, that individual governors didn’t really have much impact on the economic recoveries in their states?

“No, very little impact,” Geithner replied. He wanted me to understand that he wasn’t trying to denigrate Kasich, whom he doesn’t know, nor was he suggesting that governors couldn’t do some very important things to affect the quality of life in their states. But he noted that there are limits to the power of the office. “States generally don’t affect whether their banks fail or not,” Geithner said. “They don’t affect whether their banks lend or not. They can’t affect whether a national industry like the automobile industry survives or not. None of them have the ability to provide tax cuts on the scale that we provided them. They can’t have any material effect on the price at which people can borrow, the interest rate people have to pay to finance a car or a home in Ohio.”

By contrast, Geithner said, the levers that Washington policy makers had been able to pull were the only ones consequential enough to change the direction of Ohio’s economy. He reached for the graph again. “You know, unemployment in the country would have gone like that everywhere,” Geithner said, making an ominous upward sweep with his finger along the y-axis. “To be able to stabilize it so that it starts to turn down — that was overwhelmingly the choices that the president made and that the Fed made.”

Mitt Romney would never put it this way, but let’s be real: he would be in much better shape if unemployment rates in the most crucial states had stayed right where they were a year ago. That they haven’t presents Romney with not just a messaging problem, since his entire campaign rests on the notion that America is headed in the wrong direction, but also with an internal political problem, since his gloomy rhetoric creates some tension with his party’s own upbeat governors. Last June, Bloomberg News reported that Romney campaign officials had asked Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, to cool it on the talk about how great things were going. (Sources in the Romney camp vehemently denied the story.) Kasich, meanwhile, said almost nothing positive about Romney in our conversations, other than to say his life would be better with a president who would get the federal government out of his way. “He says he’s got a 53-point plan or whatever, I don’t know,” was Kasich’s rousing endorsement of the Romney agenda.

Romney’s campaign chairman and top surrogate in Ohio is Rob Portman, the state’s junior senator. When we met at a farm in Shelby, in the mid-Ohio region between Cleveland and Columbus, early last month, Portman was still considered a top contender for the vice-presidential nomination, and a small corps of national reporters was following his every move. I stood by while he took a staged, awkward stroll down a gravel drive with CNN’s John King, then Portman and I jumped into a Jeep bound for the city of Ontario, where he was set to cut the ribbon on the newest Republican “victory office” in the state.

As we drove past fields of corn and soybeans, I asked him if he could describe what things were like in Ohio at the worst part of the recession. He said that the low point came in January 2009, and he told me how his own family’s businesses (among them a forklift distributor and a supposedly haunted hotel) had suffered. “Those were tough times,” Portman said, but then he segued quickly to the message he wanted to deliver. “But Matt, they’re still tough,” he said. “People say, ‘Gosh, well, how can Mitt Romney make the case on the economy here in Ohio?’ I mean, look around as we go through Shelby, and you’ll see commercial space for lease. Talk to people about their plans going forward. They’re nervous about the economy.

“Just as important, look at the polling data,” Portman went on. “Ohio is not perceived by Ohioans as going in the right direction. I can get you some stuff from Gallup and Pew and other polling places that will show you that our right track, wrong direction numbers are as bad as the rest of the country.” Portman was talking about the standard poll question asked by presidential campaigns — whether the country was going in the right or wrong direction.

“People say, well, it’s only 7.2 percent unemployment,” Portman continued. “You know what? When you include the number of people who have stopped looking for work just since President Obama was sworn in, I can give you some persuasive numbers showing it’s just over 10 percent in Ohio. It’s over 11 percent nationally.” He paused, then added, “And 7.2 percent is nothing to be proud of.”

Portman apologized for his seven-minute riff on a single question, but he said he had a pretty good idea where I was going. “I kind of anticipated it because I get this a lot from national reporters who come here and say, ‘Oh, this will be a great state for President Obama because things are going so great here,’ ” he said, sounding a little exasperated. “Well, they’re not going great here.”

This was a different story from the one Kasich liked to tell. And yet it was true that downtown Shelby did seem more empty than occupied. And in Mansfield, the nearby city where General Motors closed its stamping plant as part of the industry’s restructuring, even the Wendy’s downtown had shuttered. Beneath the aggregated data that both Kasich and Obama like to cite, Ohio’s recovery is, as Portman suggested, shallow and unevenly distributed. Despite all the job growth, the state still hasn’t clawed its way back to prerecession levels. If you’re living atop a shale reserve or making cars in Lordstown, life may seem full of promise. But if you were working in one of the half-dozen coal plants that recently closed (a loss that Kasich and Romney would like to lay squarely on Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency), then the encouraging batch of numbers doesn’t mean a whole lot.

Photo

Michael Coleman, mayor of Columbus, at a meeting in the capital.Credit
Jason Fulford for The New York Times

During my recent travels in the state, I stopped into Lorain, Ohio’s 10th largest city and one of its most distressed. Unemployment in Lorain is now around 10.7 percent, and 1 in 234 homes has fallen into foreclosure. One of the only occupied storefronts in Lorain’s decimated downtown, next door to its lone coffee shop, is the new and cavernous Obama campaign office. Obama visited the Lorain area last April (with Romney close behind him), and the president’s Ohio operatives like to promote Lorain as a prime example of how the Recovery Act and the auto bailout have defibrillated dying industries. The Camaco plant, where they make the seat frames for the Chevy Cruze, is now operating around the clock during the week. U.S. Steel has added 100 or so jobs, and Republic Steel just invested $85 million to upgrade its Lorain plant.

The town’s 27-year-old mayor, Chase Ritenauer, kindly offered to take me on a tour. As we approached the steel mills, he ducked his head a bit and peered out at the occasional signs — a check-cashing joint, the Polish-American club, a couple of battered nightclubs. “This used to be the strip, because of all the people going to the mills,” Ritenauer said. “It’s, uh, not that way anymore.”

At U.S. Steel’s 271-acre campus, the plant manager, John Wilkinson, suited us up in hard hats and boots and drove us over to the Quench and Temper Finishing Mill No. 6. He explained that for several months at the height of the recession, the entire plant was idle. But now the operation had come roaring back, thanks to the tubes needed for extracting shale oil. We stood on a catwalk above the plant floor, looking out on a vast expanse of steel tubes, the heat coming off them in shimmery waves after being baked to 1,600 degrees. As far as I could see, there wasn’t a single actual steelworker. I asked Wilkinson where all the people were.

“People say we’re a manufacturing business,” he shouted over the roar of automated ovens and robotic arms. “We’re really a human-interest business. Our goal is to make sure that all our guys go home at night the same way they came in. We want to keep them out of harm’s way as much as possible.”

In other words, the company has automated its entire operation not because it was more efficient but out of concern for workers’ safety. This struck me as about as politic an answer as you could give to the question, but it also brought home the reality behind the manufacturing revival I kept hearing about in the state. While Kasich and Obama like to talk in terms of new investments made and shifts added, the reality is that modern manufacturing is a high-tech business that creates fewer opportunities in cities like Lorain than it once did. Back in the 1970s, U.S. Steel employed as many as 15,000 workers in the Lorain area. With the latest expansion, it now employs 800.

And so however out of step he may be with his own party’s governor or with the latest statistics, Romney may be right when he bets that most Buckeyes still don’t believe they’ve turned the corner. A few days after I talked with Portman, one of his aides sent over the polls he had mentioned. Sure enough, no matter who asks the question or how, you can’t get more than a third of Ohioans to say things are getting better.

So what accounts for Ohio’s improving job numbers? According to the B.L.S. data, Ohio’s growth is diverse. Manufacturing and durable goods, professional services (lawyers and accountants), health care providers — all of these sectors and others added a significant number of jobs between the middle of 2010 and the summer of 2012.

When you look at where the jobs are being added, though, the statistics tell a more one-sided story. Nearly half the jobs added in that same two-year period were either in greater Columbus or in the Cincinnati area. Columbus led the way, with an increase of about 29,000 jobs. If you look back over the last 10 years or so, while Ohio was struggling with industrial decline and foreclosures, Columbus added almost 15,000 jobs, while Cincinnati added only about 1,200 and every other area in Ohio lost jobs. (Cleveland fared the worst, watching about 97,000 jobs disappear.)

There is a story about how Columbus came through the recession largely unharmed, but it doesn’t have much to do with the governor or the president. The city has some natural advantages that others don’t: a recession-proof industry in state government, a research engine in Ohio State, a central location at the hub of the state’s other urban centers. And it’s fast becoming a regional center for financial and business services. JPMorgan Chase employs about 10,000 people at its headquarters on Polaris Parkway, and about 10,000 more in the surrounding area, making Columbus its second-largest hub outside New York. Columbus has its poverty, like every other city, and in some neighborhoods it has reached Depression-era levels, but the overall unemployment rate now stands at about 6.5 percent, which is the best among large cities in the state.

I stopped in to see Columbus’s mayor, Michael Coleman, to ask him about the competing claims over Ohio’s recovery. Coleman, who has been mayor for 12 years and can probably keep the job for life if he wants to, is a Democrat and an Obama supporter, but he’s also known to be fiscally cautious and not much of a partisan. Unusually for a city its size in the modern era, Columbus seems to rely on an amiable partnership between its Democratic mayor and the relatively small group of mostly Republican city fathers who make up an alliance called the Columbus Partnership.

Coleman described for me the situation he faced after the financial collapse in 2009. “I was laying off everything, everybody,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “I had to turn to the public and say: ‘Look here’s the deal. I’m going to continue to cut back. We’re cutting back in major services. I’m at a point now where I’ve done everything I can do to be efficient and to cut back on those things that the public doesn’t really see. Now it’s time to start cutting back on the things that they depend on.’ ” Those services included the fire and police departments, public swimming pools and trash pickup.

But Coleman did something else too. Concerned that businesses would begin to flee the city once its services began to disappear, he went to the business leaders and persuaded them that the city needed to raise its income tax by half a percentage point at the height of the recession. They agreed to finance the campaign for a pro-tax ballot initiative (The Columbus Dispatch, an acid critic of Obama and his liberal policies, repeatedly editorialized in favor of the tax hike), and the voters ultimately approved it. Most of the additional $100 million a year or so in revenue went to restoring services and improving infrastructure, like resurfacing streets and buying new police cars. But it also enabled the city to continue making planned investments in capital projects like its riverfront restoration.

Coleman credited Obama’s Recovery Act with providing a “lifeline” when the city needed it most. He used stimulus money, for instance, to reinstate a class of police cadets he had previously dismissed, and the president later came to speak at their graduation. “I don’t care what anybody says — I’m telling you it helped us,” Coleman told me. The mayor also said he was a fan of JobsOhio and thought Kasich had the right approach for keeping businesses in the state, although he didn’t see how that could be having much impact this early in the governor’s term.

But more than either of these things, when it came to the recovery in Columbus, Coleman credited the way local businesses had come together around the idea that raising revenue could stave off cuts and preserve investments. “They understand that part of selling a local economy is selling the quality of life in that local economy,” he said. “So if you don’t have good streets and good parks, if you don’t have a strong safety force and a strong fire department, if you don’t have the ability to grow the economy locally, businesses will not locate there. They’ll shrink and go somewhere else, because the quality of life is so bad. There are a lot of Ohio cities where that has happened, and it hasn’t happened in Columbus.”

It’s probably true, as Geithner says, that states rise and fall with the national economy. But it’s also true that a state or a city can make choices that enable it to ride out the economic lows and then take advantage when times get better. And to the extent that Columbus is leading Ohio’s economic rebound, and to the extent that Coleman was able to make hard choices that kept the city moving forward, he probably deserves as much credit as any other Ohio politician.

The second point you might take away from a visit to Columbus is that, as important as autos and factories and shale deposits are in creating a diverse stream of jobs and revenue, Ohio’s economic future will be largely tied to the new economy that Columbus and Cincinnati represent — banking and insurance and management consulting, state-of-the-art medical facilities, high-tech manufacturing and research. These industries thrive on the kinds of major investments in infrastructure and quality of life that only government can make, in schools and transportation and fiber optics and parkland. How politicians think about these kinds of investments, and how they intend to pay for them, would probably make for a more relevant debate this year than arguing over who created 1,000 new jobs in Canton last May, or whether the guy who sold you your Malibu can really be classified as an autoworker.

When George H. W. Bush sought re-election in 1992, he ran not only against Bill Clinton but also against the best economic estimates at the time. In the first three-quarters of that year, the economy was reported to have grown at unimpressive rates of 2 percent, 1.4 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively. Economic growth was perilously close to flat coming out of a recession, and a president whose passion was foreign policy seemed content to just hope for the best.

Such estimates are revisited and revised in the years that follow, however, and 20 years on, the final year of Bush’s presidency looks somewhat different. According to statistics compiled by the Federal Reserve in Philadelphia, the revised growth numbers for those three quarters are: 4.5 percent, 4.3 percent and 4.2 percent. In other words, the economy was pretty much flat from one quarter to the next, but it was performing at a higher level than anyone thought. From an economic standpoint, that may not matter much. But from a political standpoint, the difference between saying that growth is at 1.4 percent and being able to say it’s at 4.3 percent could conceivably be the difference between holding onto office and not.

What Obama’s economy will look like in 20 years is impossible to know. But the lesson here is that economic data often lag behind the political reality, and it can be hard to claim credit in the short term for progress that can be put in perspective only years after the fact. There’s no reasonable way to look at the state and not agree that Obama took steps that stabilized Ohio and made it possible for the state to find its footing, even if the expansion hasn’t been robust or pervasive. But if the candidate himself can’t make that argument effectively (or if he won’t even assume the risk of trying), then his vindication may come not at the ballot box this November but in some reconsideration of the data years into his retirement.

For Kasich, perhaps, the opposite is true. Generally speaking, governors may not have all that much to do with larger economic trends, but their careers are often shaped by catching the right wave at the right moment. Bill Clinton came to national prominence as a successful governor during the Reagan recovery. George W. Bush benefited from Clinton’s surging economy. Mitt Romney passed his universal health care plan in Massachusetts during Bush’s housing bubble and got out of office before it burst. And so too do Kasich and other Republican governors now hope to capitalize on the same recovery, however tepid, for which they keep lambasting Obama. If you’re the governor of a large state like Ohio, and you’ve already run for president once, it has to occur to you that if Obama stays in office, and the local economy continues to improve, you may just get another shot at running in 2016.

And so maybe Kasich was being sincere when he told me, during our conversation on the plane, that he didn’t care who got credit for creating jobs at the moment, as long as they were created under his watch. “What’s important to me is that there are now more than 94,000 families who are better off,” he said. “I don’t care what the reason is. I don’t care if it’s because of some little green man on Mars.

“When people are working,” Kasich added, “families are stronger, children are healthier and families are better. That’s all I care about. And if someone wants to say it happened because I’m standing on one leg, or because you’re wearing a gray jacket or whatever, what difference does it make?”